Even though Senator Arlen Specter failed in his bid to win the Democratic Party's nomination in Pennsylvania, he's still around for the next several months to work Congressional mischief on behalf of the plaintiffs' bar. Front and center in his efforts: his bill to reverse the Supreme Court's Iqbal and Twombly decisions reining in federal pleading rules (see earlier discussion here, here, here, here, and here).

As we've previously suggested, there are national-security implications for returning to a pre-Iqbal notice pleading standard, a point made clearly today on NRO by my law school classmate Bill Burck and his former Bush White House colleague Dana Perino, in a column discussing the interrogation of alleged Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad.